


As if death itself was undone

by Skoll



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Actually let's just go with BAMF Avengers and leave it there, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Loki, BAMF Tony Stark, F/M, Families of Choice, FrostIron - Freeform, M/M, Mind Control, Post-Apocalypse, Revolution, Science Bros, The Chitauri win
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-16
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-05 12:06:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/723119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skoll/pseuds/Skoll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where the Chitauri won the battle for Earth, Tony and the rest of the Avengers are among the very small number of people who aren't under the Chitauri's control.  Tony, these days, mostly runs recognizance and errands; without the suit or his billions, Tony's greatest skill is his ability to blend in with the mind-controlled populace.  Then a routine recognizance mission goes awry, and Tony stumbles upon an imprisoned Norse god who wants nothing more than to see Thanos dead.</p>
<p>The question is, will trusting the god of lies get Tony and his people killed, or save them?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story came out of absolutely nowhere and insisted I write it. So here it is.
> 
> The title of this story is from Florence + The Machine's song Blinding, which also acted as the soundtrack for most of this chapter as I was writing it. 
> 
> Enjoy.

It's kind of a sad world, Tony thinks, where going grocery shopping has become an activity with a threat of death tacked on to it. 

Well. It's kind of a sad world for a multitude of reasons, and most things now come with their own attached death threat for people like Tony, but for some reason grocery shopping hits him harder than most things. Maybe because it was so mundane before, Tony doesn't know.

Tony fills his cart with the necessities, careful to keep a vague, unfocused smile on his face at all times. That's why Tony usually gets sent—he, of all the survivors, is one of the best at controlling his own body, at making it show what he wants it to. Apparently lying is one of the most needed skills after their particular brand of an apocalypse: who would have guessed?

A cart bumps into Tony's, and Tony looks up to see a young woman, maybe in her twenties, with a contented expression that looks out of place when set against her mohawk, multiple piercings and ripped clothing. She meets Tony's eyes with a matching set: blue eyes, that almost glow faintly in the dim light of the grocery store. “Sorry,” she says, and smiles at him. “I was distracted.”

Tony smiles back, ignoring the sick lurch these interactions always put in his stomach. “I understand,” he says, in the faintly awed tone that passes for normal these days. “The world seems so big sometimes. So much to see.” God, he hates doing this, hates having to say the stock phrases he's learned. Of all things, he actually misses the days where people would have snapped at him to look where he was fucking going and stormed off.

“The tesseract teaches us so much,” she agrees, smile widening. “Good health to you and to the High One.”

“Good health,” Tony says, and walks away with his cart. Fuck it, Natasha can come back and get her own cereal. If Tony stands in that aisle making what passes for polite conversation for one second more, he's going to scream, and then be caught, and from there either be shot or converted. Frosted flakes just aren't worth either of those outcomes.

There's a Chitauri guard up near the register, a low level drone from the look of it, armed with one of the lower grade shock weapons. Tony, automatically, assesses the danger there—medium: he can take a shot from those and stay alive, and has done before, but they tend to knock him unconscious for upwards of fifteen minutes, and in those fifteen minutes anything could happen to him. So the trick, as ever, is just not getting shot in the first place. Tony makes his smile just a little bit brighter, just in case.

Forming up a neat line with the other shoppers, Tony waits his turn to be rung up, and wastes time by idly looking at the celebrity magazines stored around the cash register. The most terrifying thing about the entire human world suddenly being brought to a stop, Tony thinks sometimes, is how little actually changed. In the post-invasion world, people still wake up every morning and go to work, still produce stupid things like Frosted Flakes and shop for groceries and take interest in celebrity gossip. The only differences, really, are that humanity doesn't have an eye color other than 'glowing light blue' anymore, and that, ultimately, they only get to keep their own interests because the fucking High One is too lazy to dictate those sorts of minutiae.

Tony picks his groceries out of his cart and puts them on the conveyor belt when it's his turn in line, and waits lazily while the smiling cashier rings him up. “That'll be fifty-four fifty,” the cashier says, and Tony fishes for his wallet and digs out the cash and takes his bags. “Good health to you and to the High One!” the cashier says, cheerfully, as Tony makes his way out of the store, and Tony echoes it back automatically. Like he said, sometimes it's terrifying how normal interactions can seem, if you don't think about them too hard.

He has to pass the Chitauri to get out of the store. Tony smiles, keeps his eyes mostly unfocused, and doesn't flinch.

When the doors of the grocery store close behind him, he lets himself breathe out, hard, once. It's all he gives himself, though—maybe the most dangerous thing he could conceivably do now is stand out. Holding his bags at his sides, Tony matches the pace of the people on the sidewalk around him and blends in, following the blue-eyed crowd away from the store.

…

He comes home with groceries and gets a knife pressed to his neck for his troubles: some thanks, in Tony's opinion.

“Jesus, Natasha,” he says, irritated, “it's me, I'm clean.” Natasha just meets his eyes and doesn't say a word, her expression neutral in the way it usually is before she kills people. Exasperated, Tony drops one of the bags of groceries and, with the ease of long practice, pulls one of the colored contacts out of his eyes. One of these days he's going to get some sort of infection from doing that so casually—and, sadly, that infection will still be the least of his problems. “Look. Same brown eyes I was born with, and no sudden interest in spouting off generic happy bullshit. Happy now?”

Natasha's expression doesn't waver, and neither does the tip of her knife where it's pressed to Tony's skin. “I need the full protocol today, Stark,” she says, and shit, that's not good.

“My passcode is 'Just a rather very intelligent system',” Tony says, because when he had to choose a phrase it made him happy to think of Jarvis, still protecting him in his own way. The AI would have liked that—even when Tony had to shut Jarvis down after the invasion, the last thing the AI told him was to take care of himself. 

Finally, Natasha lowers the knife, and lets something resembling actual emotions show on her face. “Sorry, Tony,” she says, and steps back from the doorframe to let him in. Tony sticks his contact back in his eye for lack of anywhere better to put it, picks up the bag of groceries he dropped, and follows her in. “We're on high security today. Clint caught a Chitauri trying to pass itself for one of our people on the outer perimeter during his watch.”

Tony doesn't have to ask if Clint managed to kill the Chitauri—if he hadn't, there wouldn't be anyone left in this building. The second they're infiltrated they all have orders to scatter, and not even attempt contact with each other for over six months. That protocol saved all their lives about a year back, and it'll probably save them all again before this is over. “Who did we lose?” Tony asks instead, because he was a pragmatist before the invasion, and he's not even sure what he counts as now.

“A civilian,” Natasha says, and Tony doesn't let his expression show the relief he feels. There are so few survivors left that losing anybody is a serious loss, and so it kind of makes Tony a jackass that he's happy it was just a civilian. It's sort of a personal nightmare of Tony's that, one day, they'll lose one of the Avengers instead—the Avengers, who started out barely functioning as a team, and have since become all the family any of them have left in the world. 

“Where's Bruce?” Tony asks. Somehow, the Avengers sort of paired off in the two years since the invasion, like some sort of buddy system of codependence. Natasha and Clint, Steve and Thor, whenever Thor's on Earth and not on Asgard trying and failing to negotiate for aide from his father, and Tony and Bruce. All six of them would go through hell to keep the others safe, but they've all also got one person they basically wouldn't function without. For Tony, that's Bruce.

“Where he always is,” Natasha says, and, alright, that's a fair point. Bruce has been all but living out of the lab in the lowest level of this building, trying as hard as he can to come up with some way to reverse the Chitauri mind-control that holds the majority of humanity in its sway. When Tony can be spared from his other necessary duties, he joins Bruce there, and sometimes he thinks they might actually be getting somewhere. Mostly, they just manage to exhaust themselves and forget to eat if they're not reminded of it—and Bruce hasn't had anyone around to remind him to eat all day. “Here,” Natasha says, and holds out her hands, “I'll get the food. You go drag Banner out of his lab.”

It's her way of doing him a kindness, maybe making up for the knife at his neck earlier. “Thanks,” he says, and reaches out to brush his hand against her arm. She doesn't let herself tense at the contact, which Tony knows is her way of offering comfort in return. He hands off the bags to her and says, “And thank Hawkeye for me too. For saving all our asses.”

“Cap's called a meeting at five,” Natasha says, “tell him yourself.” With that, and the faintest hint of a smile, she turns to walk away.

Tony watches her go, burning the image of her graceful steps into his memory the way he always does when someone leaves. These days, there's no way to know if it's going to be the last time he ever sees her alive and fully herself; and so Tony's memory is full of tiny moments, of Thor wrapping his fingers around Mjolnir or Clint grinning like the devil as he draws his bow. 

Only when she's gone from Tony's line of sight does he let himself turn away, and make for the basement. Bruce isn't going to feed himself, after all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So apparently by once a week Saturdays I meant this would update on some really random Wednesday like three months later. Sorry about that. I still can't really promise regular updates, with the volume of other fics I'm writing right now and updating regularly, but I figured I'd put out a chapter to show I intend to get around to this eventually. 
> 
> Thanks so much for all the comments on last chapter, they were very appreciated. At some point I'm going to backtrack and make time to answer them (sorry again, but better late than never?).
> 
> Enjoy.

“Remind me,” Bruce says, when Tony finds him in his lab, “why we decided hitting everyone over the head was a bad idea?” 

Tony, as ever, converts Bruce's tone into an assessment of his mental state—knowing where Banner is, on a scale from one to Hulk, is kind of a vital skill to Tony these days. Right now, Bruce sounds tired, frustrated, and generally irritated, but all of those things are at a low enough level that they don't qualify him for maybe a three or four on the Bruce-Hulk continuum. Considering that the last time Bruce hulked out, they had to kill about thirty Chitauri and find a new place to live just to keep their people safe, that's definitely a good thing.

Reassured that Bruce is a safe distance from doing the whole 'mean and green' thing, Tony relaxes and answers his question. “Because we calculated that if we mobilized every single one of our people and attempted to bash people back into sanity, we still would only get to a fraction of the people being mind-controlled in New York City alone before we were captured and killed. And also that it would be really hard to write an epic poem about our heroics later, even if we did succeed.”

Bruce runs a hand over his face, throwing his hair into further disarray, and laughs, just a little. “Saving the world through head injuries is completely dignified,” he says, with his own particular, quiet brand of sarcasm. 

“It would take three hundred and sixteen trained ninjas to pull that off, not three hundred and ten civilians and six former superheroes,” Tony points out, “and I don't know about you, but my ninja training montage hasn't actually happened yet.” What? He's bone-tired, and it's only ten in the morning. The rest of Tony's day is going to be stressful and exhausting, just like the day before that and every day before for the last two years. He's allowed to spend time saying stupid things about ninjas to his best friend, if that's what keeps him going.

Instead of either laughing at Tony's terrible joke or making that face he gets over Tony's strange ideas, though, Bruce frowns. “I thought we had three hundred and eleven civilians at last count,” Bruce says, and, oh. Tony probably could have found a more dignified way to break that one to him. 

“A Chitauri tried to infiltrate us today, disguised as a civilian.” Bruce's expression twists into a grimace, and Tony can absolutely see why. While none of them know exactly how the Chitauri manage to do what they do, they do know the results: one Chitauri who, for the most part, looks identical to one of their people, and one civilian who never comes back home. Thankfully, whatever the Chitauri do to disguise themselves isn't perfect—the blue color to their eyes is usually genuine and not a removable contact, for one thing, which makes them fail the first test anyone needs to pass to get in, and that's not the only mistake they make. The disappearance of the person they're imitating, though, is absolutely final. Wherever the Chitauri take them, they never come back.

Bruce looks around his lab, clearly sizing up his equipment mentally, and asks, “Should I start packing up, then?” One of the hardest parts of moving their base around—well, besides trying to get three hundred and now-ten people safely through public transportation, which the Chitauri guard more carefully than almost anything else—is getting Bruce's lab packed up and moved with them. Scientific equipment in general is heavy, bulky, and difficult to disguise as being something else; still, though, they can't give up. The work that Bruce does, the work Tony helps him with, is just about their only chance to find a way to end the Chitauri mind-control.

“Probably,” Tony says, and raises a hand to rub at his eyes, trying to keep his body from realizing exactly how tired it is. “We've been here for nearly four months. It's just about time to move on anyway.”

“Are we still moving to the place you scoped out last month?” Bruce asks, and Tony shakes his head.

“It started filling up last week, and by now there'll be blue-eyes all over.” Property ownership has become a hell of a lot more informal since the mass mind control thing went down, and sometimes that just happens, people just moving on a whim and bringing others with them. It's still annoying, because Tony had a relatively nice abandoned apartment complex picked out for them, and now it's completely full of placidly smiling, blue-eyed idiots and Chitauri drones. “Cap called a meeting later today, but after that I think I'm going to head back out, take a look around.” By now Tony's pretty good at assessing places for their ability to hold three hundred and seventeen—shit, no, three hundred and sixteen now, Tony had almost forgotten—people in relative secrecy.

Bruce's hands clench, and the motion looks almost totally involuntary. “You could let someone else go,” Bruce says, and looks at Tony, not quite meeting Tony's eyes.

They've had this conversation before, they'll have it again, and both of them know it still won't make any difference. “Tell me who else can go,” Tony says, and his smile comes out a little rueful. “Sure, some of the civilians are great liars, god knows they regularly kick my ass at poker night, but all of them are scared of what's out there. How many of them have had to practice hiding fear, how many could we trust to not even show a moment's panic facing down a Chitauri drone? And even if they have, is there a good reason why we should subject them to that, when I'm willing to go?”

“Natasha and Clint are more than capable, and you know it,” Bruce argues, but even as he's saying it it's clear he knows it's not exactly a winning argument.

“Exactly,” Tony agrees, “they're more than capable, in basically everything our little community needs, and so their skills are in high demand. We need them protecting our people, and watching our perimeter, and doing the hundred and one other things we need done to stay alive. What other skills do I really have, Bruce? The suits have been gone for years, I can't really draw on the resources of Stark Industries any more than I already do. Other than helping you out here, the only things I'm really good for are running errands and doing house hunting.” Bruce knows this, of course he does, but Tony understands why they're having this talk. Tony is Bruce's person in all this, same as Bruce is his. “Hey,” Tony says, as a peace offering, “come on, you know I'm careful. It's not even that hard, really.”

Bruce meets Tony's eyes, and for a second just looks at Tony. Then he shakes his head, drops his gaze, and says, “I know.”

Tony lets the silence last a moment, and then claps a hand on Bruce's shoulder and changes the topic. “Alright, let's go see about getting you some food and a little sunlight, huh? Saving the world with science can wait half an hour.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you got this far and enjoyed, drop me a comment. I love hearing from readers. 
> 
> I don't know when this will update, considering I have two other Frostiron fics I'm updating weekly, but I will try to start a regular update schedule for this story. Maybe once a week Saturdays? I'll figure it out.


End file.
